So my cousin sent me a Christmas card that sent a shock wave through my brain like an aluminum bat to the skull. Said card included a comic that took me back at least 15 years to the days when he made stick figure comics centered on a certain character, one Mr. Squiggly, who was unfortunate enough to be beheaded, dismembered, crushed, and all around horribly mangled in each of his appearances. I followed suit making my own comics which were almost identical except my guy’s hair was crazier and he wore long sleeves, and his name was Mr. Mangle. Just like me to cut to the chase. There may have been a few crossover projects where Misters Squiggly and Mangle were wantonly abused in the presence of one another. In any case I was inspired. These fellas needed a fresh new look for the 21st century, and I being half of their creators felt it just and prudent to take matters into my own hands. This may become something bigger if mandrake takes an interest…

Here’s a quick rundown of what’s new:

New Pulp Heroes. Check it out. For whatever reason I’m on a strangely grotesque humor streak, but a comic made is one more comic under my belt and one step closer to the future!

I’m still working on trying to get an RSS compatible gallery up and running. I struggled for a few hours this weekend trying to get gallery2 to work but I think there was some incompatibility between my Linux server and the version of the MySQL database that godaddy was forcing me to use. I then spent many many more hours trying to delete 20 megs of nested folders from said server, which was not made easy through the use of LeechFTP or the godaddy Java FTP Tool. I started deleting yesterday and just got finished this morning. If anyone has a suggestion for a better FTP client, I’m willing to hear your case.

There’s a new sketch in my sketch o the week. I know I haven’t been very true to the name of that album but better late than never, no?

Also, I’m hunting for strange alternative Christmas songs to make some kind of enjoyable holiday cd.

I have the following songs thus far:

Broken Social Scene – Handjobs for the Holidays

Stiff Little Fingers – Punk Rock Xmas

Kevin Bloody Wilson – Hey Santa Claus (You Cunt!)

Pogues – Christmas in the Drunk Tank

Gil Mantera’s Party Dream – Brave New Christmas

The Kinks – Father Christmas

Morphine – Sexy Christmas Baby Mine

I know there’s a Billy Idol Xmas song out there somewhere, and I’m also aware that there have been whole albums released by popular alternative bands throughout the years (No Doubt’s Oi to the World comes to mind, and still makes me shudder) but if anyone has any favorite ‘hip’ holiday songs that they’d like to share it’d sure help to fill this Grinch with a little holiday cheer.

Let the comments fly!

So Borders Books keeps sending me 40% off DVD boxed set coupons valid for ever-increasing spans of time. I received one on Sunday I think, good until Wednesday, and they sent me a reminder today that the coupon they sent me expired after today, and they gave me another coupon just to be sure. This is probably the third or fourth such coupon I’ve received this holiday season and it’s really starting to feel a little like spam. If I recall correctly they did this deal only twice last christmas, and public response was pretty good. But guys, c’mon, you’re starting to look desperate, which you are. I hear your sales are down millions of dollars compared to 2006, and you need some fresh tactics if you’re going to draw people in. Do you remember the Joker from 1989’s Batman? How long do you think his tactic of swaying the masses by throwing a parade, tossing out stacks of cash into the crowd, only to gas them all to death, would have worked in the long run? Do you think that people would have come back for a second parade? Or a third even? Free money, good wholesome fun, POISON GAS. I see the poison gas as an analog of Borders ridiculously high prices, and those coupons bring box sets merely into Amazon.com range. Borders is effectively poisoning the populous with their lies of fantastic savings. But never fear good citizens, the day will come when Michael Keaton stiffly swoops in, clad in black rubber and drops George Jones off the top of a clock tower.

Happy Holidays!

Editors Note: Can you believe 1989’s Batman won an Oscar?

Sure, the guitars are plastic. Sure you can never effectively serenade your true love with an acoustic version of a song that sounds more like the clacking mouth parts of a large, angry stag beetle than anything that could be considered music. But rock and roll comes from the soul, right? Real rockers don’t even need guitars. I’ll just keep telling myself that to make me feel better.

So it occurred to me that I hadn’t made any posts about GH3, despite it being a game that has eaten up a large portion of my time lately. Or at least it had until I banged skulls with hard mode and was verily slain by KISS. I wanna rock and roll all night, but my fingers will hate me the next day. As much as I enjoy playing the game and love the developing the intense, high speed eye to brain to finger coordination skills required to get through the higher level songs, they tend to give me some hand cramps that could give their menstrual counterpart a run for their money. Mmm, hyperbole. Anyway, the above photo is of my beloved Wii Les Paul guitar controller, decked out with some select stickers. Although looking at it now, I think it’s a little sparsely adorned. I’ll have to have someone look into that. Like any GH3 player worth their salt, I’ve registered on guitarhero.com, and you can check out my Profile if you’d like.

You can check out the photo set that Chuck put together of our semi-recent all night rock fest that took place in Columbus, OH back in November. The best part about playing with a group of people is that they can put underwear on your head and take pictures of your crotch and there’s not a whole lot you can do about it.

As I was asked about this recently I figured I’d relink it here. It leads to the Infamous Tax Law Comic that maybe nobody paid attention to except for its ingenious creators. Speaking of the ingenious creators, I was able to easily locate it on my site by searching for “tax comic” and “law comic” using that handy search bar on the side. It strikes me that the other creator wasn’t trying very hard to find it. In any case, it gives me a great excuse to put up that fine looking devil head shot. Hellfire looks good on him.

A more general desire to update the old web log brought me here tonite, after I had spent a good portion of the day languishing in pain on my sofa from overdoing a workout Thursday morning. After downing some Ibuprofen and snorting a few lines of Potassium I was in condition enough to hobble to the store and buy some other restoratives to cure what ails me. Not my ideal plan for a Saturday but it was a damn good excuse to be lazy and play a little more Phantom Hourglass on my recently purchased Crimson and Black DS Lite.  I could rant about my love hate relationship with video games. It would involve talking about how I really like playing them, but then inevitably when I do I look back at it as wasted time and sort of resent doing so. Then I’d probably go in the direction of what I’d do with that time instead, like maybe re-establishing contact with my angsty inner artist who probably wouldn’t be so pissed off if I spent time drawing on a regular basis. And this all comes after a week of heightened productivity, during which I managed to post a new french freye based Pulp Heroes comic and put together a bizarre little holiday greeting card for which I need to find some means of printing. Prior to that I came up with a nice solution to a shirt design that Danny wanted, only I need to find some way to get that printed while making it worth my while financially. And it’s less about my desire to earn money for the art that I make as it is my desire to not be hundreds of dollars in the hole just so I can fulfill a promise I made.

I think all of the above can be summed up with a simple statement of “Holidays are fucking stressful”.  Winter break is a bit of a joke, tumbling from finals right into having to find the right gifts for everybody, while at the same time trying to do all those things you couldn’t make room in your schedule for with your newly found free time. It’s all a bit much.

There were some other things I had been thinking about lately which were more investigative thoughts which I won’t allow to be tainted by the negative spin this post has taken. Other than that I hope to get a few more comics done before school starts back up again, so I’ll at least update here when those go up.